Yeah the problems with all these data centers are largely solvable. The power usage part wouldn’t be an issue either if they were also investing in sufficient renewable sources to power these things, but instead when they don’t just dump the burden on whatever is already there they’re always reopening ancient coal plants or setting up gas turbines.

Data centers can be built in a responsible way, but the big ones aren't, instead they are built with the dirtiest and most resource consuming means possible because that is the only way to build them as fast as possible.

Responsibly built data centers of the future should be obliged not only to use closed loop systems but also actually use their huge amounts of heat instead of merely wasting it. Feeding distributed heating systems (or alternative ways of productively using that heat) should be obligatory. I know the situation is not the same as with gas power plants for example but it is incredibly wasteful not to use all that heat for something productive. We are talking about many MW here. For reference, the fairly sizeable waste incinerator plant Spittelau in Vienna has a capacity of 400 MW. There are currently data centers being built in the US with capacities higher than that and absolutely nothing productive is done with the waste heat.

Strict regulation is needed but not only that. Those gas turbines would be actually already illegal today. Laws are not enforced anymore for the oligarchs in the US. In other countries that nonsense would not fly already today.

As with most things, the problem is never the technology itself, technologies have problems, and we find solutions for those problems, that's what we do, that's how the progress of technology works. But nobody these days wants to let us have the solutions to the problems or even know what they are, when they can monetize a temporary remedy they can sell to us instead. And the problem is profitable, so they want to force us to have the problem; they won't let us stop using the problem technology either. Vulture capitalists preying on civilization and waiting for all of us to collapse from exhaustion so they can feed on our wallets, not caring that they're watching us die.

What's the power scale of yours?

I suspect the big ones use evaporative cooling because they're trying to build in the gigawatt scale and IIRC there was talk about single racks reaching a megawatt soon, currently they're ~150 kW.

The power density of those new nVIdia GPU compute servers is nuts and using evaporative cooling means less energy use than closed loop.

What I'm saying is, some of those planned datacenters wouldn't be feasible with closed-loop water cooling. And yes, I agree with you that this should be legislated. If they can't cool their servers without evaporating a bunch of drinking water, they can... have fewer servers.

But that would cost more money! Then line might go up a little less! Won't anybody think of the poor investors!

It’s because they do t like how we organize with technology. They’re taking their toys and going home. None of us can have computers anymore, it’ll all be cloud tablets they control.